Over the past 15 years, the automotive industry has succeeded in addressing the need for fast and effective design, simulation, and development of control systems through “off-the-shelf” software tools. Companies such as Toyota have led the adoption of such tools and the concept of Model-Based Design. In this E-Symposium, Dr. Ken Butts of the Toyota Technical Center, USA presents some of the physical modeling challenges facing the company today and its vision for the future development of Rapid Plant Modeling methodologies based on symbolic computation.